"A Girl of the Streets" by Stephen Crane

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane shows that the environment that a person is raised in will have an effect on that person's life in the future. The story is a tragedy of a family, the Johnson's, who are living a life of poverty and abuse in the slums of New York City in the late 19th century. The main character, Maggie Johnson, has a dream to escape her life of poverty and brutality. Maggie is described to have "blossomed in a mud puddle" (Crane 22) but she eventually begins to live the life of prostitution and she dies a tragic death. Most critics say "Crane reveals quite strikingly his own psychological involvement in his literary works," (Gullason 148) and others say, "He tried to live what he'd already written" (Benfey 5).…